The Finland Station
by AtheneMiranda
Summary: In 2012, Raiden is floating in a laboratory vat while the Madnars reconstruct his body; his mind roams free in VR, and there he finds another cyborg ninja. Raiden & Gray Fox; just genfic...for now.


-this is a direct continuation of a Raiden & Fox drabble I wrote recently; I've c/ped it in as an intro just for the sake of clarity.

-I think this is a Part 1 Of 2 but I don't know if or when I might add more to it, so I'm posting it as a stand-alone for now.

-**warning:** the purpose of the ninja is to flip out and kill people - so this fic contains a fair bit of gore.

***

_The Patriots had cut him down to almost nothing, and the Madnars had to build him back from there; the rest would take time to regrow, they said, but a complete shell would suffice in the interim. There would be no need for internal organs, or an internal skeleton; better to let his spine and skull float in a tough shell of the biochemical soup that was almost, but not quite, like blood._

_The first Dr Madnar ambled about the lab in a cyborg body himself, better than human, with little wheels on the soles of his feet and fingers that resembled nothing more than Swiss Army knives, all scalpels and attachments and probes. He was an old man, and had no intention of ever being a frail one, much less a dead one. The second Dr Madnar was padding about in ballet shoes, and her ideas were more fresh and fierce than his; she had designed a shell with split feet and she spent her days mixing up new and improved versions of his blood chemistry._

_They had cut away as much of him as they could and still leave him alive. He had whole new definitions of living, now; to breathe, to have a heartbeat, neither was necessary and both had been edited out of his new corpus. To think, feel, experience the world, all unnecessary; he spent his days in VR, in whichever imaginary worlds Ellen had managed to hack and copy over to their local area network. There were military memories there, old training missions for black ops squads long ago priced out by PMCs; there were forgotten ops, the abandonware of war-as-it-was._

_Deep inside one, he found another thing just like him, walking in a shell and cutting through digital armies. It was part of an old Shadow Moses sim but constructed in some idealised form, all the elements swilling around like the blood inside the cyborg body, the complications disassembled after the fact - and put back together a piece at a time. He followed it through the snow, and down corridors, and past corpses; he wanted to stop it and ask it what the hell this was about. Another cyborg, but bleeding red onto the hangar floor, but still _made_ of something, still real enough to feel pain and to remember having bones and sinew. He wanted to fence with it, to taste it, to bring it back to life, but when Ellen turned off the sim it would be gone._

*

It wasn't always possible to keep the other man within sight (the other man, the other machine ghost program washed-up soldier like himself). But he could always follow the trail of corpses. Sometimes they were in groups, piles arrayed almost neatly in maintenance tunnels; sometimes he found them singly, bleeding a streak of red into the river or scattered in several pieces across a flowerbed. Raiden kept tracking the other from one carcass to the next, tirelessly, thoughtlessly.

He wanted to call mission support to say that he had a feeling he wasn't in Alaska any more.

That was when he remembered it wasn't real and that his whole world had been coded by crazy scientists and Ellen Madnar could destroy it any moment. Any moment. There was no mission support, never had been; just him alone in a fractured world that someone else had made and then broken. No escape from this isolation save for a trail of bloody footprints.

At first he'd thought it was carelessness on Ellen's part, leaving him to get lost in here while they made him a new body. Maybe it was more like a breadcrumb-trail laid out to lead him to where he'd always been headed.

Wherever the hell _that_ was.

After crossing a narrow and sheer ravine (where he might have lost his quarry had it not been for the flock of vultures that shed feathers between corpse and corpse, following with as much hunger as he did), Raiden came to a wall with a door that swung inwards when he touched it, the remains of a tough magnetic lock lying in pieces on the ground. That didn't mean a goddamn thing here. Ellen could have done it. It could have been superfluous. He could have walked through the walls, except that he was no more real than they were. But inside there was another body. It was rolled halfway off a ledge, one arm and one leg dangling over the precipice as they set into rigor mortis. He didn't recognise the uniforms they wore here, only the hammer-and-sickle on the sleeve, and the equipment so outdated he was amazed someone had bothered to stimulate it.

He might have studied the man's face, but his head had been severed at the neck.

A long ladder dropped from that ledge down into the darkness below. He set his feet on the blood-spattered rungs, and from somewhere deep inside the program, he felt music.

*

At the foot of the ladder he found himself in a small room that opened out onto a wider tunnel. There should have been a vicious draft sweeping back towards the place above, but there was nothing. A defect in the stimulation. He should call mission support about that -

He stepped out. It was a station platform, tiled in white - there was none of the litter on the tracks or stench in the air that he would have expected from the New York subway. No graffiti save for the blood painted on the walls. It looked clean, unused, more like a plan than a place. He wondered if the rails were really electrified, and if it would be worth it to find out.

The cyborg was sitting on a bench facing the rails, his high-frequency blade laid across his knees. _Finally._

He took a step towards it, and was fixed by that unblinking red eye.

_Something_ flipped; a row of switches turning from 1 to 0. Raiden froze, thinking to wait out the loading scene, but there was no pause in the transition - just an exoskeletal shell disintegrating into telltale white-edged hexagons, colour bleeding into the nothingness underneath the whole scene, until the cyborg body was completely gone.

In its place was a sharp-faced blond in a weatherbeaten trenchcoat, FOXHOUND insignia worn to barely-recognisable threads, sword still unsheathed, eyes still holding Raiden's with mechanical focus and a gloved hand rummaging in a pocket. "Want a smoke?"

Raiden stumbled a few steps closer. Yeah. "Sure." He stood uncertainly by the edge of the bench. His instincts didn't like to be inside the reach of that weapon - but fuck, it wasn't like any of this was _real_ anyway. He took a cigarette from the offered pack, and leaned down to accept a light.

This was why soldiers learned to smoke; so they could share a smoke with other soldiers when they wanted to be sociable but hadn't a fucking clue who was on who's side or what the hell anyone had to say. When two men make a united stand against the no-smoking sign on the wall behind them, that makes them buddies. Though Raiden would never learn to _like _smoking, even in VR.

There were words on the tiles opposite, partially obscured by the gory décor job the cyborg had performed before his arrival. "..._Shibuya Station_? How...why the _hell_ -"

"Ellen." Short answer. Good answer. He waited for the longer one. "It's not just about military research, for her. She has wider interests. Ballet, drama. She likes Kabuki, and Beijing opera. Most of all, she likes bringing opposite sides together."

"She likes cyborgs."

The other guy let that hang for a moment without replying. "Cyborgs," he said eventually, "are just a means to an end. And her end is destroying the border. Any border." A grin crossed his face, for all of a split second. "There's no passport control on this line."

Raiden could guess how seriously this guy took the idea of passport controls.

"The dreamers up there..." He waved a hand, maybe indicating the real world he didn't exist in any more. "They've been wanting to do it for decades. They've designed imaginary bridges over glaciers. They've dug tunnels under the sea." He exhaled, and the smoke didn't dissipate right; it was gone far too quickly. "Wanting to join all the lines together, but always running out of money or failing to match gauges. Ellen's done it. It just took a little creativity. She's grafted planners' simulations together into a virtual overmap that's as good as the real thing." He paused, his expression scrunching scars together. "As far as I know, anyway. I've never been to real Tokyo." That faint smile was back. How fucking aware could you _be_ of your own non-reality, your own undeath?

Well, Raiden was slowly working that one out. "So the trains here go to...?"

"Every railway station in the whole fucking world. You can get anywhere, and fast, so long as it's connected. Right now, I'm on my way to meet a friend." His voice hung on the last word a little. Doesn't use it often, right?

He could hear the low thunder of an approaching train. Gray Fox tossed aside his cigarette and rose to his feet, sword in his right hand, the left reaching for a gun holstered under his coat. The air moved, now, but in a too-perfect, too-scentless rhythm that Raiden's brain failed to believe in but which had his hair quite carried away. He stood at Fox's shoulder, ready for the next screen.

He couldn't read the words spelled out in lights on the front of the train. Something Cyrillic. "What's that say?"

"_Finlyandsky vokzal_", Fox replied. That meant no more to him. "The Finland Station. You can come with me, if you want."

"What happens if I don't?"

He shrugged. "How the fuck would I know?"

Raiden wasn't sure what he'd expected from the passengers on that train - smartly-dressed salarymen, perhaps, or the fashionable delinquents who rode subway trains in NYC.

What they got was a platoon of Arsenal Tengus, leaping from the train in black-clad pairs.

*

They'd slumped in adjoining seats, both breathing hard in spite of the lack of real oxygen. Gray Fox was cleaning his blade with a handkerchief. Raiden didn't have one, so simply wiped it off on the seat beside him, letting dark blood soak into the plush fabric. It would fade soon, he knew - if he walked a few carriages away, he might return to find it vanished entirely. He knew VR.

There was a faint breeze as the train rushed through the city, because part of an Arsenal Tengu was still stuck in the door. A leg - looked to be a left one, hacked off at the thigh, the toe of its boot caught between the closing doors. There were other oddments scattered about the carriage - a couple more limbs and a few fingers, some brain tissue dotted over the floor near the other exit, and even most of a head, pearly eyes fixed open behind its mask. He wasn't sure how many different individuals these gory fragments had come from. _None_, he reminded himself. There _were no Arsenal Tengus_. They were just part of the game.

That led him to a question, one Raiden should have been afraid to ask but simply wasn't any more. "So why are _you_ here?"

"I told you," Fox replied shortly. "I'm going to meet a friend."

Raiden shook his head. "That's not what I mean. I mean, why did Ellen Madnar put you in this fucking program?"

Fox turned aside, laying his sword on the ground by his feet. "Finally," he murmured. "A FOXHOUND agent who can think outside the box."

"I'm not an agent. I only ever thought I was with FOXHOUND."

"FOXHOUND only ever thought I was with them. Not a whole fucking lot of difference." Nice parry. Raiden waited for the counterattack. "I'm here for _you_, why else?"

He nodded. "Figures. Virtual missions only exist for the benefit of the trainee." He let the thought walk onwards from there. "So what am I being trained for?"

Fox looked at him sharply, and Raiden knew exactly why. He hadn't asked that question when he'd been through his previous VR training; he certainly hadn't asked it when he'd been a child in Liberia (- and that thought could have swept him clean off the rails, if he hadn't known, from whispered secrets embedded in old training modules, that Gray Fox had been born to that same hell). How many of their kind had _ever_ asked? Many, perhaps, but always too late.

After a while, he received a word in reply. "Survival."

"Right." Not jungle survival, or desert survival. Something more absolute than that. Survival in a body twisted into a machine, because it was the only way life could still hold you. And Gray Fox would be the perfect instructor -

- He caught himself in the tail of his own thoughts again. Gray Fox would, indeed, be a great instructor, because he's been through all this and is now utterly, irretrievably dead. It was GW all over again - Fox wasn't talking to Raiden. _Raiden_ was talking to Raiden. And taking a shape from Shadow Moses because Shadow Moses was the only damn thing he'd ever _believed_ in. "You're not real," he hissed. "You're just an illusion I made up. How the fuck are you going to instruct me in anything?"

He half-expected Gray Fox to fall to pieces before his challenge, like his AI Colonel once had. Maybe disintegrate, or just delete himself from the simulation without a word, like a ghost struck by daylight. But he simply raised his left arm and laid it over the top of the row of seats, close to touching Raiden's shoulder. "I'm as real as you, your sword, this train, and the rail bridge from Japan to Korea. Is that good enough for you?"

His eyes were set with determination hard as stone, and Raiden felt his own ideas breaking against them. God, was there _nothing_ that could stop this man from -

_Fox, you only believe in yourself because that's what you're programmed to do._

"If you're real, you need to tell me something," he said. This was a test. A latency test, a server ping. "Tell me something that I don't know." Fox waited patiently for him to elaborate. "I mean, tell me _anything_. Anything that you know that I don't."

He thought for a moment, then said, "Pettrovich Madnar has been clinically dead since 2002."

"Something Ellen doesn't know either," Raiden snapped.

Fox raised his eyebrows a quarter-inch, as if he were a little taken aback. "Fine," he said, then fell quiet, and Raiden decided that he couldn't do it. There wasn't _enough_ of him; Gray Fox was just data wrapped in a digital avatar - an exoskeleton, an old trenchcoat - and any answers he had were part of the software.

It's just a game and there's nothing new here.

Right?

"Something I've learned that you and Ellen haven't? Try this." Fox swung in his seat to face him, his arm still resting close, his boots brushing against Raiden's own. "When you fall in love with someone and then the whole fucking edifice - the Patriots and all their machinations - tear the two of you apart, that doesn't make you stop loving them." Raiden's mouth opened, but no words came out. "It _can't_. They don't have the power to do that. All their twisted bullshit ever does is make you love _more_."

Raiden saw the flying landscape at the windows turn to nothing. That bridge Fox had mentioned, he guessed. The one that had never been built in the real world. They were crossing some hypothetical plan of it that Ellen had stolen from an architect, so of course there was no background sim. Just girders flowing over the sea.

Something had to give, as they crossed the bridge over nothing. If he was real and Fox was real and the bridge was real then -

_Rose doesn't exist._

Love doesn't exist. It can't exist. It would be a crazy antigravity, clawing harder and harder the further it gets away. Who could even simulate that?

Love is an error code, and Rose doesn't exist.

Fox had settled back in his seat, still holding his eyes. "You should try that one on my friend. She has something to tell you too."

_She_? Damn, these programs were predictable. "Something about...?" (_love?_)

"Survival," Fox said. "We should be there soon. Depends how long it takes to bypass China and Siberia."

"Shouldn't we be travelling at the speed of light?"

"We should be_ thinking _at the speed of light - are we?" Raiden blinked. "You're getting faster, though. You'll be deflecting bullets in no time. It's all in the mind, that, you know?"

***


End file.
